Angel Island

"The air-life may not have been better or finer," Peachy continued,

"but, somehow, it seemed clearer and purer. The earth's such a cluttered

place. It's so full of things. You can hardly see it for the stuff

that's on it. From above it seems beautiful, but near - ."

"Yet, it is on the earth that we must live - and that Angela must live,"

Julia interpolated gently.

"But what is the use of our learning to walk?" Peachy demanded.

"To teach Angela how to walk and all the other girl-children that are

coming to us."

"But I am afraid," Peachy said anxiously, that if Angela learned to

walk, she would forget how to fly."

"On the contrary," Julia declared, "she would fly better for knowing how

to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly."

"I don't see it," interposed Clara emphatically. "I don't see what we

get out of walking or what Angela will get out of it. Suppose we learned

to walk? The men would stop helping us along. We'd lose the appeal of

helplessness."

"But what is there about what you call 'the appeal of helplessness' that

makes it worth keeping?" Julia asked, smiling affectionately into

Clara's eyes. "Why shouldn't we lose it?"

"Why, because," Clara exclaimed indignantly, "because - because - why,

because," she ended lamely. Then, with one of her unexpected bursts of

mental candor, "I'm sure I don't know why," she admitted, "except that

we have always appealed to them for that reason. Then again," she took

up her argument from another angle, "if we learn to walk, they won't

wait on us any more. They may even stop giving us things. As it is now,

they're really very generous to us."

The others smiled with varying degrees of furtiveness. Pete, as they all

knew, could always placate an incensed Clara by offering her some loot

of the homeward way: a bunch of flowers, a handful of nuts, beautifully

colored pebbles, shells with the iridescence still wet on them. She soon

tired of these toys, but she liked the excitement of the surprise.

"Generous to us!" Chiquita burst out - and this was as unexpected as

Lulu's face-about. "Well, when you come to that, they're never generous

to us. They make us pay for all they give us. They seem generous - but

they aren't really - any more than we are."

"They are far from generous," said Peachy. "They are ungenerous. They're

tyrants. They're despots. See how they took advantage of our innocence

and ignorance of earth-conditions."